Why Interreg and the Right to Stay strategy need each other

When Enrico Letta warned of a “new geography of discontent,” and when the European Commission set out the right to stay as a guiding principle - that leaving your region should be a free choice, never a necessity - they named a problem that is, at heart, territorial and social. People leave when the jobs, the skills, the care and the sense of community thin out. They stay when those things hold.

The forthcoming Right to Stay strategy is the EU’s attempt to make staying a real option again, especially in the border, rural, island, mountain and remote regions most exposed to decline.

In Interreg, Europe already has part of the machinery to support this. 

What Interreg gives the Right to Stay

Cooperation across borders is one of the most place-based forms of cohesion. Read through the social lens of the strategy, the numbers are striking. Across the 2014–2020 and 2021–2027 periods, Interreg has backed more than 2 000 cooperation projects on employment, skills, education and social inclusion, mobilising over €2 billion in EU funding. Behind those projects sit 8 000-plus partners rooted in real communities, and the map of where they work traces precisely the places the strategy worries about: internal borders, the Pyrenees and the Alps, the Baltic and the Adriatic, the islands and the outermost regions.

That focus is not fading; it is sharpening. Between the two periods, the share of projects tackling rural areas more than doubled, attention to ageing populations nearly doubled, and the geographic reach widened from 34 to 44 countries. The work is concrete. Cross-border labour markets and shared employment services; vocational training for young people in mountain valleys so they can build a future where they grew up; recruiting and keeping health professionals in the Arctic; skilling workforces in island economies; strengthening the social economy so local jobs multiply.

Interreg has already delivered in many of these areas. For a strategy that has to showcase what works and highlight regional and local solutions, that record is exactly the evidence base it needs.

What the Right to Stay gives Interreg

The relationship runs both ways. For all its results, Interreg has long struggled to tell its story in a single, resonant sentence. The right to stay offers one. It reframes thousands of scattered projects as a coherent mission: helping people choose to remain. It gives cross-border cooperation a place at the centre of the EU’s biggest political conversation - competitiveness, demography, security and cohesion - rather than the margins.

It also sharpens purpose across the whole family of programmes. Cross-border, transnational, interregional and outermost-regions cooperation each answer a different facet of what makes a place worth staying in. And as the post-2027 architecture takes shape, a strategy that explicitly values place-based, multilevel, cooperative action is a strong argument for sustaining and trusting

Two freedoms, built together

As Letta put it, the freedom to move and the freedom to stay should be developed together. Interreg has spent three decades turning borders from barriers into shared opportunity, making it possible to live on one side and work, learn or seek care on the other. That is the right to stay in action, long before it had a name.

The Right to Stay strategy and Interreg are not two separate stories. They are the same story, told from two ends. One sets the ambition; the other already does the work. One of the clearest opportunities for the strategy is to build on what is proven, and the smartest thing Interreg can do is claim the mission as its own.

More information at Interact | Interreg and the Right to Stay Evidence in a more Social Europe